Fundamentals for the Academic Liaison

Citation

Tom Avery (2015), "Fundamentals for the Academic Liaison", The Electronic Library, Vol. 33 No. 5, pp. 962-963. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-03-2015-0050

This handbook lays out the fundamentals of the work of the academic liaison librarian. “A library liaison’s role is to act as a link or bridge between the library and faculty, staff, and students” (p. 8). The authors say this book is about “establishing genuine and useful relationships with others” (p. 8). It is written for library and information students and academic librarians serving as liaisons. The authors are American, and all have years of experience in academic libraries.

It provides an excellent overview of all major aspects of the role. For new liaisons, the whole text is particularly useful; for experienced liaisons, the chapters on online tutorials, embedded librarianship, evaluation and communicating with and assisting faculty are particularly useful for reinvigorating your liaison work. The chapters that resonated the most with this reviewer were those on the relationships with faculty, online tutorials, teaching information literacy and embedded librarianship.

Chapter 3, Communication with faculty, would be useful to any new liaison to help develop the all important relationship with faculty. Throughout the text it is reiterated how important this relationship is for many aspects of liaison; from being embedded in teaching environments, to contributing to course development and to supporting faculty with research. The suggestions for building the relationship are arguably taken too far. The authors advise the reader to learn about faculty members’ hobbies and children, even suggesting to “possibly friend them on Facebook or LinkedIn” (p. 39). No reference is made to social media policies your organisation might have, or whether it’s a good idea to entangle your professional online identity with your personal one.

Chapter 4 has useful advice for creating online tutorials. Be they screencasts, quizzes or filmed productions, the advice is to determine objectives and audience before filming and storyboarding is recommended. Chapter 5, on Faculty assistance, would have librarians seen as “comrades in arms rather than the help” (p. 79). It was edifying to read that “librarians are often considered to be at the forefront of emerging technologies” (p. 74). I’d argue many faculty can be more or less technologically savvy.

The least useful but still important chapters were those on collection development, library guides and accreditation. These chapters were prescriptive, yet practices and policies will be unique to individual libraries. Chapter 9 on library guides focused almost exclusively on SlideShare’s LibGuides. If your library already has LibGuides, or conversely doesn’t have, this chapter would be of little use. Chapter 10 on accreditation, understandably discussed in the US context, is largely irrelevant to an international audience.

“The goal of this writing is to give these liaisons a baseline of information for working in this environment and to pinpoint the key areas of understanding needed for this job” (p. 183.) I believe the authors have succeeded in their goal.